The field of the invention relates generally to mechanical/electrical equipment operations, monitoring and diagnostics, and more specifically, to systems and methods for monitoring a group of plant equipment locally and selectively monitoring the fleet of plant equipment remotely.
At least some known industrial plants that operate significant numbers of machines monitor and diagnose the health of such machines using a local control system. The local control system may also communicate values of sensed process parameters to an offsite monitoring center for data storage, analysis, and troubleshooting. Typically, the data communicated is relatively old data from a historian and/or is communicated in one direction from the plant to the fleet monitoring center. To take advantage of an equipment supplier's expertise with their equipment that the owner of the plant has purchased, a field service engineer may be required to visit the plant site to observe near real-time data collection and to adjust existing controllers. Plant visits are costly, labor intensive, and difficult to manage on short notice.